Turntable: What’s GBH’s classical music connoisseur listening to?

It’s time for a check-in with GBH’s classical music connoisseur, Brian McCreath, director of production at GBH Music and host of CRB’s Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcast.

He joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share his picks for this edition of the All Things Considered Turntable. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

Arun Rath: Let’s dive right in. What do you have up for us first?

Brian McCreath: There’s so many good things going on, but first, we’re going to stay a little bit local. But our local orchestra happens to have an international profile. They’ve just released the culmination project that they’ve been working on for 10 years — the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, along with all the concertos and a lot of other pieces.

But I want to focus on one particular little part of this, and that is the two piano concertos by Shostakovich that were performed and recorded with Yuja Wang, one of the most dynamic, fiery, interesting, technically capable. ... I can’t say enough about Yuja Wang. She’s an amazing pianist, and it’s always one of those circumstances where she shows up in the hall and just lights the place on fire.

Rath: We talked about her for the Turangalîla-Symphonie.

McCreath: She was the one who did Turangalîla — the [composer Olivier] Messiaen piece — with the BSO, indeed. She’s become a regular guest of the BSO, fortunately, for those of us who love hearing great pianists with great orchestras, but this is really something special because these two piano concertos by Shostakovich sit a little bit out of the center of gravity for this composer.

We think of Shostakovich’s symphonies as having all this geopolitical and personal weight of the Soviet Union, kind of making this, often, a painful but very valuable experience. The two piano concertos are a little bit different. And before I describe more of it, let’s just hear a little of the last movement of the first piano concerto by Shostakovich.

[Yuja Wang - Boston Symphony Orchestra - Andris Nelsons - Shostakovich]

McCreath: It’s got this really kind of manic, kind of crazed feeling about it in a way, right? It kind of harkens back to when Shostakovich was writing for silent films early in the 1920s. He had this sense of cabaret, kind of like crazy entertainment.

Rath: Yes, this feels like a soundtrack.

McCreath: Yeah. And Yuja just goes nuts, right? What makes this concert especially distinctive is what’s about to happen in just a second here... this solo trumpet comes in! It’s just a string orchestra with a solo trumpet and piano.

The solo trumpet plays this really, really important role in the dialogue between the piano and the orchestra, and it’s Thomas Rolfs, the principal trumpeter of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

This piece and their recording are just really electric. I just love this piece.

Rath: It’s beautiful, and like you’re saying, it does stand apart from the rest of Shostakovich, in a really kind of bright and beautiful way.

McCreath: Yeah, there’s joy in it, there’s sarcasm, but mostly, it’s just this kind of crazy, almost vaudeville-type entertainment.

Rath: This is awesome — more great stuff to dig into. Okay, number two. What do you have queued up for us next?

McCreath: So, there’s a string quartet called Brooklyn Rider, and they’re celebrating their 20th-anniversary season this year. Brooklyn Rider is a quartet made up of four standard musicians for a string quartet, but they have this intellectual curiosity that really sets them apart. There are a lot of great quartets that play Shostakovich, [German composer] Mendelssohn, Beethoven string quartets, and Takács. ... You know, you can name any number of great quartets.

Rath: They’re kind of like the Kronos [Quartet].

McCreath: That’s a nice analogy. They’re not quite the same exact thing, but they’re very curious about new composers, about thematic programs, about big-scale, very thoughtful projects.

They’ve released something that is very explicitly about climate change. This album is the elements, the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. They’ve lined up a set of pieces in each of these categories that evoke what, to them, reflects philosophically from that elemental part of human history.

The part that I want to play for you now falls under Earth, and Colin Jacobsen, one of the violinists in the quartet, arranged folk songs as collected by [composer] Ruth Crawford Seeger, the stepmother of Pete Seeger. This particular cut is “Little Birdie.” Let’s hear a little of it.

[A Short While To Be Here... - V. Little Birdie - Colin Jacobsen, Brooklyn Rider]

Rath: That is wonderful.

McCreath: When I was growing up, I would listen to Pete Seeger sing “Little Birdie,” because it’s an American folk song. But Ruth Crawford Seeger is this eminent woman who, in the middle of the 20th century, collected folk songs. She was also one of the first real modernist composers in America and, as I said, the stepmother of Pete Seeger.

What Colin Jacobsen did was he took these folk songs, as collected by Seeger, and made a suite that he calls “A Short While to Be Here,” and that’s part of the Earth section of this album. Now, the thing about Brooklyn Rider and almost anything they do is that we can’t take this as representative of everything else on this album. There’s so much else going on with this album.

Rath: There’s a lot of “ground.”

McCreath: Yeah. And air! There’s a lot of air, there’s a lot of groundwater. But they have music by [French composer] Henri Dutilleux, by [Argentine composer] Osvaldo Golijov, by [American] Conrad Tao — who we know as a pianist, one of the really great pianists working right now, but also a composer — and other composers that are really fascinating and all speak to these elements in the framework of climate change and a statement about the emotions that we are all being connected to because of climate change.

Rath: It’s amazing. I’ve just started to dip into it. I think I’ve got to spend the weekend with it — because it’s so much.

McCreath: It’s worthy of many weekends, actually. There’s so much going on.

Rath: We have time for one more recording. What’s pick number three?

McCreath: This has actually been out for about a year now, but it has stayed with me because of the story behind it. And also just the sheer delight of hearing the music! Let’s actually hear the music first, and then we’ll talk a little about it.

[Forgotten Sounds: World Premiere Recording of Loeffler’s Rediscovered Octet - Graeme Steele Johnson and friends]

McCreath: It’s just this beautiful chamber piece. It’s an octet written by this fellow named Charles Martin Loeffler. Loeffler is almost forgotten now, but he was born in Germany — eventually took on a French personality, even though he wasn’t really French.

He came to Boston as a member of the Boston Symphony in its second season. He was the assistant concertmaster in the second season of the BSO. And his music became one of the most played composers’ music in the early years of the BSO — 117 times the BSO has played music by Loeffler, mostly in that era of the late 19th and early 20th century.

The story with the octet is that it was a piece that was written, I’m going to forget the year, but I think maybe 1896. It was played once in a private performance for Isabella Stewart Gardner, and then never played again. This clarinetist named Graeme Steele Johnson ran across a reference to it, and he thought, “Oh, that sounds interesting. I’ll look that up.”

There was nowhere to look it up. He couldn’t find anything else about it except this one little reference to it in some letter. And so he went to the Library of Congress, found the manuscript, prepared a performing edition of it and now, brought this piece back.

I think in these times, we need music that simply lets us calm ourselves and be in a beautiful space. That’s the kind of piece this is, but with this really, really interesting, very locally connected story behind it.

Rath: Yeah, I mean, the story is almost as beautiful as the music — it just sat in the Library of Congress for over 100 years, and nobody heard it until now.

McCreath: Nobody really knew about it. And this happened during the pandemic — it’s maybe one of those silver lining stories from the pandemic that Graeme Steele Johnson found himself with nothing to do. He found this reference, tracked down the piece and prepared the parts and everything.

The critic for the Washington Post, Michael Brodeur, described the music as a watercolor swirl of [Johannes] Brahms and [Maurice] Ravel, [Claude] Debussy and [Arnold] Schoenberg.